The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin

7 – (Alfred North Whitehead) Everything important has been said before.

36 (William James) Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.

37 (Samuel Johnson) It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery, and as much happiness as possible.

40 – There is only love.

41 – (G.K. Chesterton) It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.

46 – I remember talking to a friend whose parents had been very involved in the civil rights movement. “They always said,” he told me, “that you have to do that kind of work for yourself. If you do it for other people, you end up wanting them to acknowledge it and be grateful and to give you credit. If you do it for yourself, you don’t expect other people to react in a particular way.”

48 – (Mark Twain) An uneasy conscience is a hair in the mouth.

55 – (Pierre Reverdy) There is no love; there are only proofs of love.

76 – (Anthony Trollope) A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.

84 – In his book Happier, Tal Ben-Shahar describes the “arrival fallacy.” the belief that when you arrive at a certain destination, you’ll be happy.

98 – The most important lesson from Faber and Mazlish’s books is simple and as applicable to adults as to children: we should acknowledge the reality of people’s feelings.

119 – (C.S. Lewis) When I was ten I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

126 – (Isaiah Berlin) We are doomed to choose and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.

135 – (Andy Warhol) Either once only, or every day. If you do something once it’s exciting, and if you do it every day it’s exciting. But if you do it, say, twice or just almost every day, it’s not good any more.

153 – (Flannery O’Connor) From 15 to 18 is an age at which one is very sensitive to the sins of others, as I know from recollections of myself. At that age you don’t look for what is hidden. It is a sign of maturity not to be scandalized and to try to find explanations in charity.

178 (Lisa Grunwald) Best is good, better is best.

198 (William Edward Hartpole Lecky) There are times in the lives of most of us when we would have given all the world to be as we were but yesterday, though that yesterday had passed over us unappreciated and unenjoyed.

209 (Herman Hesse) Happiness is a how; not a what. A talent, not an object.

223 – … some people feel overwhelmed by the question “What’s your passion?” It seems so large and unanswerable that they feel paralyzed. If so, a useful clue to finding a passion to pursue, whether for work or play, is to “Do what you do.”